Third-graders at Sunnyvale Elementary School measure how far a classmate threw a football in math class. The Sunnyvale district is emphasizing activities less about STAAR test questions and more about emphasizing student engagement.

Physics students count how many times a flying pig passes a yardstick to study circular motion at Sunnyvale High School.

Rolling out of North Texas and across the state, a cadre of unlikely rebels is fomenting public opposition to the official school accountability standards.

Public school superintendents are rarely willing to embroil themselves in politics. But dozens of them are saying this is that unusual time, before next year’s session of the state Legislature.

Nothing about assessment will change this school year. But some teachers are already being told to introduce methods and strategies that explicitly do not “teach to the test.”

“Y’all, we are under attack,” said Commerce ISD Superintendent Blake Cooper at a meeting this week of the chiefs of more than a dozen smaller districts east of Dallas. “I’m sick and tired of hearing politicians using our kids as political pawns.”

Others, however, say the superintendents are resisting tough, fair standards. Bill Hammond, head of the Texas Association of Business, strongly backs the assessment process, which depends almost entirely on the results of STAAR tests.

“The public school accountability system is at risk now, in terms of push-back from superintendents,’ he said at a news conference last week.

Cooper spoke at the first assembly of the newly minted Community Schools Transformation Alliance in Sunnyvale. That district’s chief, Doug Williams, is a leader in the push-back against the emphasis on STAAR tests.

The system was put in place during the last legislative session with a bill signed with great fanfare by Gov. Rick Perry. So only the Legislature can change the system.

This year, superintendents have moved from largely grumbling to one another into public opposition.

A position statement that condemns the system as “over reliance on standardized, high stakes testing” has been approved by school boards representing about 90 percent of Texas public school students. The statement has also been approved by business leaders including chambers of commerce in McKinney, Rockwall, Lufkin, Kaufman and Denison.

Depending on your point of view, Coppell Superintendent Jeff Turner is either a Thomas Paine or a Che Guevara in this effort.

He’s one of the founders of the North Texas Regional Consortium, a group of districts that includes Allen, Coppell, Frisco, Lewisville, McKinney, Plano, Northwest and Richardson. And as the current president of the Texas Association of School Administrators, he’s encouraged creation of more than a dozen other regional associations.

“Some system of accountability is absolutely necessary,” Turner said this week, echoing what many other superintendents say. “The system we have is not that system.”

The STAAR-based system, he said, forces teaching to a test that prepares students poorly for the world after high school.

He and several of the superintendents leading the charge say they aren’t whining about failure. All three Sunnyvale schools, for instance, earned “exemplary” ratings in 2011. But they deride the well-known accountability ratings — exemplary, recognized, acceptable, unacceptable — as “Realtors’ ratings” more useful in selling homes than rating schools.

“We are going to quit flying the ‘exemplary’ banners and come up with our own system for measuring what’s important here,” Williams said.

Supporters of the STAAR-based system have a succinct reply: Test-based accountability works. Since statewide standards were introduced in 1992, gaps between whites and traditionally underserved minorities have closed. And STAAR, they say, is a better and tougher test than its predecessors.

“It’s the students, their families and taxpayers who will pay the ultimate price — through increases in public safety net services, loss of jobs and loss of local and state revenue — if we don’t press ahead with a stronger, more comprehensive accountability system across K-12 grade levels,” said Sandy Kress, an adviser on education to George W. Bush and Perry.

Turner acknowledges that Texas history demonstrates the need for accountability.

“We admit in the past we held on to the model way too long,” he said.

But the pendulum, he says, swung too far to where students in grades three through 11 face at least two and as many as four STAAR tests per year.

Shifting expectations

Williams, in Sunnyvale, is among superintendents who have worked with school boards and parents to shift expectations about tests.

The Sunnyvale board was among the first to approve the resolution against high-stakes testing. Next, the district started working on ideas for accountability ratings. It approved a new way of assessing teachers. And finally, it called two “parent summits” to explain the change in emphasis.

“Across the state already, there is a movement to de-emphasize state tests and really focus on what’s important for our kids,” Williams told parents late last month.

It’s wrong, he said, to train a second-grader that the most important thing in education is to be prepared for a test as a third-grader.

This week, evidence of change could already be seen across Sunnyvale ISD’s three campuses:

A toy pig flew circles in Jimmy Wilson’s high school physics class. Students worked to calculate centrifugal force on the class SmartBoard. At the middle school, Mitzi Miller’s class was using technology — an application called Blabberize — to turn written autobiographies into videos. At the elementary school, Wendy Beard’s class was outside on the playground checking the measurements on its one-third scale football field.

These were all activities less about STAAR questions and more about meeting new teacher assessment standards that emphasize demonstrable student engagement with the material.

In the Legislature

Accountability will almost certainly be discussed during next year’s legislative session.

Rep. Jimmie Don Aycock, R-Killeen, was named to the Legislative Honor Roll by the Texas State PTA and as a Champion of Free Enterprise by Hammond’s Texas Association of Business. Earlier this year, he created a blog about possible changes in the accountability system.

The topic “has taken a pretty vigorous, high-visibility political life for anybody who is watching,” he said.

He got about 100 suggestions, some of which he’s considering, he said.

In addition to possible moves in the Legislature, action on accountability is happening on at least two other fronts:

The Texas education commissioner’s office released a draft last week that would replace the single accountability rating for districts and schools with four categories: Student achievement, student progress, closing performance gaps and postsecondary readiness. But the only factor considered other than STAAR results is related to graduation rates.

Also last week, the state held its first meeting of the Texas High Performance Consortium. The consortium was created by the Legislature to allow a few districts to experiment with new assessment and education methods. It includes 23 districts, including Coppell, Richardson, McKinney and Highland Park. Its members hope to have the outline of an alternate assessment system early next year.

Meanwhile, superintendents not involved in those projects are ramping up their efforts to take their argument to the public. Eric Wright was another speaker at the meeting in Sunnyvale. He’s the superintendent in Huntington and is a leader of a consortium of East Texas districts.

He explained how his group got the Lufkin Chamber of Commerce to sign on to the statement calling for reduced reliance on STAAR tests.

“The only way we can change schools is politics,” he said. “But it can’t be politics as usual.”